


Doubt

by FancyTumbles (FancyTrinkets)



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Background Aziraphale/Crowley, Ficlet, Gen, POV Crowley (Good Omens), Soft Crowley (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:20:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24272725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FancyTrinkets/pseuds/FancyTumbles
Summary: Alright, yeah, Crowley knows he's soft.
Comments: 22
Kudos: 37
Collections: Good Omens Celebration





	Doubt

Alright, yeah, he knows he's soft. He likes a bit of mischief, to be sure, and he's all for stirring up drama. Got to keep things interesting after all these years. It's not entirely his fault that the mischief goes wrong sometimes, spirals out of hand — escalates — and then people get hurt. People die.

The thing is, he doesn't like hurting them. He doesn't like it when they suffer. But that's not the sort of thing you admit to anyone when your employer is, quite literally, Hell.

He's expected to enact evil on earth and deliver souls to their eternal damnation. So, you know, he comes up with elaborate schemes. They do cause real harm — they have to or they won't get approved — but they aren't particularly vicious and when he explains them, he purposefully tries to confuse his bosses.

And also, he lies a lot, takes credit for legions of terrible plans he never authored. In a way, you could call it plagiarism. And that's sort of evil. In a way. At least, it is frowned upon these days. 

So, it's a dangerous way to live. But he doesn't think about it often. He's lived the lie for so long that it's hard to be sure of the truth anymore.

But he wonders, sometimes, about the others. His colleagues in Hell, are they pretending, too? Are they gentle on the inside? Did all the softest angels Fall?

And then he thinks of Hastur and realizes that no, it can't be that. Plenty of demons are ruffians through and through.

Perhaps the only ones pretending, the only ones lying to their bosses all the time, are himself and Aziraphale. Because regardless of how hard that angel clings to the Plan, Crowley can see right through it. Something as deep and despairing as existential doubt is pretty hard to hide from a demon.

**Author's Note:**

> I know there’s pushback in fandom about the soft/not evil reading of Crowley. And I appreciate all that meta a whole lot. It’s interesting and good and nuanced.
> 
> But, I will say, personally, soft/kind Crowley is super meaningful to me. 
> 
> As an atheist who was raised in a deeply religious and authoritarian sort of Catholicism, where the worst thing you could ever do was reject God, there is something powerful and wonderful about reading a demon as deeply kind. Not all the time, sure, nobody’s kind all the time. But by looking at a demon and saying, nah, not really evil, just has a job to do, it is liberating. It feels important to let that reading exist, too, without saying it’s always naive or woobifying.


End file.
